Session: (WITHDRAWN) Family Policy and Complex Families Around the World (Society for Social Work and Research 28th Annual Conference - Recentering & Democratizing Knowledge: The Next 30 Years of Social Work Science)

Families are changing around the world. Children in families of different types may not be well served by policies developed during a period when more children lived in nuclear families, yet we know relatively little about family complexity or family policy across countries, and even less about whether family policies are appropriately serving children in different family forms. Although there are limits to policy transfer, US policymakers can learn from the approaches and experiences of other countries. This symposium brings together four novel papers that provide information on the level of family complexity in several different countries, and key policies that affect children, with a particular focus on whether current policies have responded to family change. New information is provided on the extent to which several policies have consistent effects across different country contexts.

The first paper, "Family Complexity among Children in Colombia...," introduces the issues by providing an overview of family change around the world, with a particular focus on Colombia, an important contribution because Colombia has one of the lowest rates of nuclear families in the world. The paper uses a longitudinal survey to examine not only the level of family complexity, but also changes over time. The second paper, "Prevalence and Predictors of Children's Joint Physical Custody...," uses newly-released data on 17 European countries to examine the level and correlates of a relatively new family form, children who live approximately half-time with each parent after separation. They find substantial differences across countries in the prevalence of this emerging family form; their results suggest that country-level policies may be important in shaping children's living arrangements. The third paper, "Child Support Compliance in South Korea...," is focused on the extent to which nonresident fathers are complying with child support obligations in Korea. Although the findings from South Korea show some similarities to the way child support policy is working in the US and other Western industrialized countries, there are also important differences, suggesting that cultural and policy contexts do matter. The fourth paper, "Children's Living Arrangements in Four Latin-American Countries: Implications for Poverty and Family Benefits," examines the extent to which benefits are alleviating poverty among different types of families in Brazil, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay. A consistent, but surprising, finding emerges: even though single-parent families are poorer than two-parent families, they receive less in government benefits.

Two senior discussants have been invited to address what US policymakers can learn from this set of papers, as well as commenting on the strengths and limits of comparative policy research. The audience not only learns about family change, family policy, and the effects of family policy in a variety of country contexts, but also is challenged to consider changes to US policy.